One of the topics that keeps coming up in ICANN policy discussions and as part of the new TLD application process is "transparency".

ICANN, and the internet community in general, has had plenty of issues in the past with "bad actors" who have caused a lot of issues for everyone (think of many of the registrars who have lost accreditation in the last couple of years for example).

On more than one conference call or policy discussion the issue of a company or a person's track record has come up.

Now while I personally think that anyone who has been knowingly involved in criminal activity OR who has knowingly been involved with a serious breach of ICANN policy (or any of the contracts) should be barred from any further involvement with the DNS, a blanket ban is not without its own set of issues.

The larger the company the more likely it will have been involved with litigation or criminal law suits at some point or other in the past.

And who is pushing for all these "checks and balances" within the ICANN processes? In many cases it's the big brand owners, who live in fear of "squatters" and other "evil doers".

So why do I raise this?

Well George Kirikos has, yet again, managed to dig up some quite revealing data about some of the companies that likely to be involved in new TLDs in the future and who have been very vocal in the ICANN "space" over the last few years.

You can read the full text of what George uncovered here, but suffice to say that a lot of the big brands and companies aren't as "clean" as they'd like us all to be (and no that wasn't a typo).

Unilever, Disney, Coca-Cola, Time Warner, Yahoo! and Telstra are all named and, if you'll excuse the cliche, shamed…

By Michele Neylon, MD of Blacknight Solutions. More blog posts from Michele Neylon can also be read here.